Tag Archives: Wave

Women Set the Pace as Online Gamers [NYTimes.com] – “Although women are still slightly in the minority among global Web users, they are closing ground with men and, once connected, spend about two more hours online a month on average. […] Women also outpace men in photo sharing and shopping, and in what may come as a surprise, gaming, favoring casual puzzle, card and board games. Female gamers over 55 spend the most time online gaming of any demographic by far and are nearly as common as the most represented group, males 15 to 24.”

Omo GPS stunt opens doors for marketers [News.com.au] – Unilever Brazil has embedded 60 GPS trackers in OMO washing liquid bottles and then their teams have followed the pruchasers of these bottles home and given them prizes. Understandably, many privacy issues have been raised!

Does Facebook unite us or divide us? [CNN.com] – Brilliant, and a little confronting, TED talk from Ethan Zuckerman (senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society) looking at how globalisation might be a technical achievement, but not a social or mediated one (“cosmopolitan globalisation”). We look to our own social networks, and they increasingly narrow our perspective rather than broadening it.

CommBank app lets people snoop on your house [SMH] – House-pricing information is apparently available to the public generally, but there is a real sense of privacy invasion at work here: “There’s a brand new property app on the block that gives iPhone users detailed information on the value of any house they care to point their handset towards, but privacy experts warn it may not sit well with the neighbourhood watch. Detailing sales prices of 95 per cent of Australian homes, the free app has been launched by the Commonwealth Bank in a bid to deliver more immediate buying and selling information to the public as they are actually viewing properties, helping them to ward off rogue sellers who attempt to talk up property prices. Just by pointing an iPhone at a particular property, they will be able to see the last sale price of the property, and if the home is actually for sale, the app will bring up a listing from realestate.com.au with details such as home layout and pictures.”

Thunderous Bolt sensitive to parody [ABC The Drum Unleashed] – Jason Wilson weighs in on fake Twitter profiles in the wake of Andrew Bolt’s angry denouncement of (fake) himself: “Online fakery is something that draws on different strands in online and offline cultural history. Apart from drawing on early online examples like Fake Steve Jobs, Twitter faking has links with political impersonation, writing techniques like pastiche, and it also has some relationship to genres like fan fiction. After all, the best fakes don’t just go after their targets with blunt instruments, they create a narrative world for the fake persona to inhabit …”

MPs warned to avoid hasty blogs [BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics] – The next generation of [UK] Labour MPs have been warned to be careful about what they write on blogs and websites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – as comments made in haste remain on the internet forever. At a packed fringe meeting hosted by Google at the Labour conference, activists, prospective and current MPs were told of the benefits of social networking sites – where politicians can get their message out without civil servants and special advisers getting in the way. Labour’s newly crowned “Twitter tsar”, MP Kerry McCarthy, made a bid to win over the sceptics by saying it did not have to be a burden […] But in a word of warning Adewale Oshineye, a Google engineer, advised prospective MPs to bear in mind they were publishing something that could be dug out years later. “When you are saying something amusing as a prospective parliamentary candidate, in four or five years’ time when you are a cabinet minister and someone digs that up…””

Online advertising ‘overtakes TV’ [BBC NEWS | Business] – “Online advertising spending in the UK has overtaken television expenditure for the first time, a report has said. Outlay grew 4.6% to £1.752bn between January and July, according to the study by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The recession saw overall advertising slide by 16% in the period, according to the study. E-mail campaigns, classified adverts, display ads and search marketing are all classed as online advertising. The body representing UK commercial television broadcasters said that the comparison was unfair.” (Unfair … or harder to pitch against?)

Aussies call an end to just phoning on mobiles [The Age] – “Using mobiles for just calls and texting is a thing of the past, as a third of Australians now check emails on their handsets and more than 70 per cent access mobile entertainment and information services. In spite of the global financial crisis, the use of mobile phone services has continued to grow in the past year as more Australians buy internet-enabled smartphones, the 2009 Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index reveals. Released today by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association, the exhaustive survey of 3710 respondents found 36% used email on their mobiles in the past 12 months, and, of those, almost half used email daily – a growth rate of 80 per cent over the previous year. In last year’s survey, just 7 per cent of respondents accessed social networking sites from their handsets, but this figure has jumped this year to 32 per cent, with half of those accessing the sites daily.”

Sarah Brown becomes Britain’s highest-profile Twitter user [Politics | guardian.co.uk] – “Sarah Brown [wife of UK PM] has overtaken Stephen Fry as Britain’s highest profile Twitter user, it emerged today. “SarahBrown10” has gained more than 775,000 followers since joining the social networking service in March, outstripping Fry’s 768,000. The number of fans keeping up with Brown’s tweets amounts to almost five times the entire Labour party membership. The prime minister’s wife steers clear of political controversy in her messages, instead giving followers glimpses into her day-to-day life and publicising her favourite charities. … Since joining Twitter, Brown has sent out 1,162 messages, each limited to 140 characters. Ross Furlong, an online public relations expert, said Brown’s tweets could help Labour despite the fact that she does not use them for campaigning purposes. “Although the content is deliberately not party political, she is effectively pressing voter flesh online, as she did in person at the Glenrothes byelection to great effect,” Furlong said .”